The main question: how can Cloudflare make this into a sustainable business?
* cost/gb is cheaper or same as s3, gcp, azure
* no egress charges to customers, but they still have to pay for transit when they cross an AS!
what is the hidden angle Cloudfare is using here?
The offer is no doubt competitively prized, but it's no doubt much more lucrative than people using Cloudflare as a CDN for their s3/b2/azure/whatever.
Eg. What could be the hidden angle of providing domains at cost ( which they do).
I think it's a matter of having a more complete cloud suite and expanding their portfolio while gaining market share.
Clarification: I don't think they do this at cost. Just cheaper than the big 3.
They seem to learn a lot by centralizing a lot of the internet's traffic through their core. Perhaps it makes their ddos-protection more robust when they can train on "what normal usage" looks like "for the longer tail".
Perhaps they are building moats around that business and expecting a future when Fortune1000 requires their cdn.
Their CDN is based on their SDN. Which is also at the core of all their products, including DDOS protection.
Their primary product is the SDN and a CDN was a logical pick as first product "release".
Eg. You shouldn't consider their products in "regions" as traditional cloud providers. In cloudflare it's programmable, not configurable.
It's a net gain, with a storage price higher than B2 or Wasabi, and also moves your data to their platform for more ecosystem lock-in.
That's their advantage -- a global network that only exits to the local AS.
Can somebody TL;DR what does being member of the "bandwidth alliance" mean?
Cloud providers normally have huge profits on egress data ( outgoing) and not incoming data ( to attract giving them your data).
This additionally incentives customers to stay within a certain cloud and not using competing products based on costs ( since egress costs to a 3rd party makes the price difference obsolete)
Cloudflare ( i think) started the bandwidth alliance to make these prices more fair. As in: work together, have direct network connections and reduce customer billing.
AWS didn't want to join as they are n°1 currently: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/